Source: (consider it)
|
Thread: The Death of Darwinism
|
Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
|
Posted
quote: Originally posted by mousethief: I'm having a hard time thinking somebody flipped a coin. There must be something neutrinos have in common with protons, photons, neutrons, electrons, etc. (things that are indisputably "matter") that anti-neutrinos do not?
Photons aren't "matter". A photon is also an antiphoton, so it doesn't get to play for either team. When we talk about matter, we mean the fermions.
But the protons and neutrons thing is interesting. In the current Standard Model, quarks and leptons don't couple. That means that there's no mechanism to connect the matter-ness of electrons and neutrinos with the matter-ness of up and down quarks, and so in the current SM, we make the arbitrary assertion that electrons are "matter" like up and down quarks (and hence protons and neutrons).
In the unified theory that everyone thinks must exist, leptons and quarks are combined in an irreducible representation of the symmetry group of the unified theory (SU(5) is the smallest possible such symmetry group, although I think the non-observation of proton decay has pretty much ruled out all the SU(5) possibilities.) This combination places quarks and leptons in the same representation, and so ties the matter-ness of quarks and leptons together.
Posts: 5026 | From: USA | Registered: Feb 2013
| IP: Logged
|
|
Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
|
Posted
LC--
Thanks.
Alan--
quote: Originally posted by Alan Cresswell: It does rather depend on what you mean by "matter". Does it, for example, include energy that can transform into particles?
That's what I was thinking of. In that view, aren't matter and energy flip sides of each other? Sort of like energy is matter dancing very fast, and matter is energy meditating? (Don't laugh too hard, please! I've been using that comparison for a long time, and it makes sense to me.)
Thanks.
-------------------- Blessed Gator, pray for us! --"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon") --"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
|
Posted
quote: Originally posted by Golden Key: That's what I was thinking of. In that view, aren't matter and energy flip sides of each other? Sort of like energy is matter dancing very fast, and matter is energy meditating?
When photons undergo pair production (which they do), they produce a particle and its antiparticle at the same time. So matter-ness is conserved: you start with a photon (no matter) and end with an electron and a positron, say (no net matter - a particle and its antiparticle).
In order to generate a matter-filled universe from a big bang, you need a mechanism that produces matter from energy without producing antimatter at the same time.
Or alternatively, you make equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and then have a mechanism to sweep all the matter over in one direction, and all the antimatter in the other direction, and leave a big gap in the middle.
The former is easier to imagine than the latter.
Posts: 5026 | From: USA | Registered: Feb 2013
| IP: Logged
|
|
Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
|
Posted
So why does 'matter' predominate?
I imagine in me complete ignorance that there was an imbalance in matter-antimatter creation, but to what degree and why how can one know?
Any road up, I came here to muse on a conversation outside the public toilets at Wells-next-the-Sea on Saturday, in shadow of the terribly moving memorial to the 11 men drowned in the 1880 Eliza Adams lifeboat disaster, leaving 10 widows and 27 orphans, unmemorialized, in a small town.
I was photographing Solanum nigrum (in the OPPOSITE direction to the front of the toilets ...), across the road from the tide monitoring station where the iridescent starlings roost, which is germane. A woman commented on the colours which she which 'you don't usually notice'. I repressed the impulse to hold forth on them not being due to pigmentation but to iridescence. Then I realised I couldn't explain the latter more deeply without opening up the Pandora's box of interference, phase shifting, thin-film interference and diffraction. I imagine in feathers it's thin-film interference. Or diffraction. Or both.
An older chap like me came out the toilet and stood by me as I crouched by the flowers, 'A nightshade.' I said. He launched in to a little homily about looking at a butterfly 'the other day' and saying that it didn't have to be SO beautiful.
I didn't get his agenda and said it was due to competition. He ignored me and said that it was excessively beautiful because it had a designer, 'God' and walked away as I said 'Maybe both'.
What a typically depressing interaction.
Particularly as I don't subscribe to ID in the slightest degree apart from in the original creation of this universe.
In which there was a bias toward matter. [ 23. October 2017, 08:56: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
-------------------- Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
|
Posted
'strewth! Sub-cellular, 100 nm, melanosome-keratin layers. The blind watchmaker strikes again!
-------------------- Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
balaam
Making an ass of myself
# 4543
|
Posted
It's 43 years since university so I have forgotten most of it, but if I remember correctly it would not need that great an imbalance between matter and anti-matter, then it snowballed.
I am sure someone who is more up to date in their Astro-physics will now correct me.
-------------------- Last ever sig ...
blog
Posts: 9049 | From: Hen Ogledd | Registered: May 2003
| IP: Logged
|
|
Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
|
Posted
quote: Originally posted by Martin60: So why does 'matter' predominate?
A less matter-centric view might be that matter doesn't predominate, empty space does. Non-matter, not matter nor anti-matter.
-------------------- Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
|
Posted
Matter predominates because, like the woman that John Lennon wants, wants so bad it's driving him mad, it's so heavy.
-------------------- This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
|
Posted
Like life and death, matter and energy are actually the same thing. You just have to understand that our ideas of life and death, and matter and energy are products of our languages and thus metaphors at best. Symbolic representations of underlying reality.
Plato told us thousands of years ago that we see shadows of reality reflected on the walls of the cave. We don't see actual reality. So when you think matter versus energy you're doing what I do:thinking in human terms. More easily (for me) consider 3 dimensions: then try to think of a 4th at right angles to those. Warps the mind, but it's on the track toward understanding. Similar also is particle-wave: light is both and neither. Sometimes it's useful to think of as one or the other, but these are merely metaphors not really approaching what it truly is. Because we haven't a concept for it.
Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
| IP: Logged
|
|
Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
|
Posted
quote: Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...: matter and energy are actually the same thing.
Well, yes. And, no. In certain circumstances matter and energy can exchange between each other - energy becoming matter, and matter becoming energy. But, that doesn't make them the same.
At a very (with lots of other very's) early time in the universe the initial energy of the universe cooled sufficiently for it to transform into "matter" and "anti-matter" (both of which really are different forms of matter). There was a very (with lots of other very's) slight bias towards matter in that process, so that as that matter and anti-matter annihilated to produce photons (yet another form of matter) there was a little bit of matter left over, just enough to form stars and planets and galaxies .... and people like us to wonder about it all.
The problem is that we don't know why there was that little bit of extra matter formed. We invoke "symmetry breaking", something where the properties of matter and anti-matter are very slightly asymmetric - mass, magnetic moments ... something. Though, we've yet to find any such asymmetry - within the last few days results have been published measuring the magnetic moment of anti-protons, identical to that of protons to 19 decimal places.
-------------------- Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
|
Posted
Alan--
Perhaps, when matter and anti-matter love each other very, very much...?
-------------------- Blessed Gator, pray for us! --"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon") --"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
|
Posted
Thanks Alan. That's the piece of the jigsaw. Symmetry breaking. You've brought it in from the Oort Cloud for me. Can we quantify the tilt toward ordinary matter in baryogenesis?
-------------------- Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
|
Posted
And ooh, Alan, are the monopole, flatness and horizon problems real?
-------------------- Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
|